Social acceptance, lost objects, and obsession with the ‘public’—The pressing need for enhanced conceptual and methodological rigor

Abstract

The cluster-analysis of literature on social acceptance of energy innovation (Gaede and Rowlands, June 2018) necessitated critical comments (Wolsink, December 2018). Their response to my critique rightly points out that the criticism was not just about their questionable selection of literature, but also concerned established tendencies in the literature. The latter asked for a response in which a deepened and more up-to-date definition of the concept of social acceptance was elaborated.This rebuttal highlights the absence of the object of acceptance processes in the original visualization of the literature. Crucial shifts in the object remained completely out of sight. For example, the shift from separate renewable sources towards innovation in which various renewables are integrated – with each other, with technologies of storage, distribution, and demand response. Acceptance processes concern all elements of that integration, in particular the ones obstructed by the institutional lock-in of power supply. The most important objects concern the full transformation of current institutional foundations of power supply – central, uniform, hierarchic – towards foundations based on variety, polycentric management, and self-organization of intelligent distributed energy systems (DES).Secondly, the conclusions of the visualization were not based on any interpretation about the meaning of keywords used for sampling, only on their frequencies. These conclusions are not ‘objective’ results, as claimed, but based on applications of wavering and fuzzy conceptualizations in an excess of one-shot single case studies. Nevertheless substantive conclusions about the direction of Social Acceptance research were presented. These proposed directions are worrying, such as the relapse into research of mere acceptance by the public instead of research on all relevant social processes. Social science investigating acceptation processes urgently needs to implement more rigorous and stable methodologies and concepts, preferably applying theories covering all three layers of acceptance processes such as common pool resources theory.